Category: Blog

After 26 years, Ohio has passed a new law that will overhaul its child support system. In this article in the Toledo Blade, there is a summary of the changes to the law and interviews with those affected by these changes. 

July 27, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Another state is going down the wrong road regarding its child welfare agency (Daily Advance, 7/15/18). This time it’s North Carolina and the wrong road it’s travelling is named “do more with insufficient resources.”

It seems that the legislature passed a bill last year that sets performance standards for the Division of Social Services that’s part of the Department of Health and Human Services. It’s appropriate to get nervous when lawmakers start micromanaging services like those provided by DSS. They don’t know what they’re doing and passing a law that’s equally applicable to every DSS unit in every county in the state is presumptively a bad idea. Face it, the law they passed isn’t flexible, but not all counties are alike.

But that’s what the legislature did and now county-level DSS agencies are stuck with it. Now, DSS is tasked with child protection, foster care and adoptions out of foster care, but those are just a few of its jobs. I won’t deal with its requirement to protect the elderly, monitor child support, administer the food stamp program, etc. The legislature mandated performance standards in those areas too, but I’ll just address child welfare, foster care and related topics.

A few of the law’s new benchmarks include:

* DSS agencies will initiate 95 percent of child welfare screening reports within required time frames.

* No more than 9 percent of maltreated children will be found maltreated again after a year.

* County DSS agencies will “provide leadership” for ensuring 41 percent of children in foster care are found permanent homes within a year.

* County DSS agencies process 95 percent of child care subsidies within 30 calendar days of the application.

Of course North Carolina’s child welfare agencies are stretched too thin as it is. After all, their failure/inability to deal properly with reports of child abuse or neglect is why the legislature mandated the new standards. But demanding vastly more of agencies that are already unable to meet lower standards isn’t exactly a reliable way of improving matters. As in Texas, Arizona and elsewhere, the new law looks very much like the feigned indignation of lawmakers who know that the only real way to change things is to provide more money with which to hire more caseworkers, lower caseloads and retain experienced personnel, but refuse to do so.

It being a law passed by the state legislature, there’s nothing counties can do about it except protest, and that’s exactly what some of them are doing. Counties are required to sign an agreement saying they’ll abide by the new standards.

The county was required to approve the agreement even though Pasquotank officials disagree with it, Hammett and DSS Director Melissa Stokely told commissioners. That prompted commissioners to take the unusual step of approving the agreement but also including a “signing statement” protesting its terms — a step officials in Camden and Currituck counties have also taken with their agreements with DHHS.

Stokely told Pasquotank commissioners that “DSS agencies have been very clear to the state, to DHHS, to anybody that will listen, these (new standards) are not reasonable, and we already know there are areas we’re not going to meet.”

She continued, “We can’t meet (them), because we are dependent on people outside of our control — the court system, others, judges — to meet these mandates.”

Stokely also said her office would need more staff to “even come close” to meeting certain requirements.

Let’s see, standards that “are not reasonable” and that counties won’t “even come close” to meeting. What could possibly go wrong? Oh, not only that, but Pasquotank County commissioners said in writing that the agreement with the state they’re forced to sign is “unconscionable.”

Pasquotank commissioners appeared to suggest that, under the agreement the county was required to sign, the county’s DSS office is being set up to fail.

From here, that looks all too obvious. It seems the legislature wanted to consolidate county DSS agencies into fewer regional ones, a move counties opposed. The new standards look like lawmakers’ way of exacting revenge. Will Rogers once compared lawmaking to sausage making because it’s not a good idea to look closely at either. Such is the case in North Carolina.

What will happen when, inevitably, county DSS units don’t come up to the mark?

The agreement counties are being required to sign also provide that, if a county fails to meet the performance requirements, DHHS may require they enter into performance improvement and corrective action plans. If those plans don’t work, DHHS may cut off state and federal funding, and ultimately take over the local DSS office.

And then what? Will DHHS miraculously have more money, more caseworkers, more time, fewer cases? Of course not, so what magic bullet does DHHS have that its sub-agency, DSS, doesn’t? None. So what will change? Nothing. They’ll hire the same people to do the same jobs in the same ways. And, since those people can’t get the job done now, they won’t then either.

This is not rocket science. As Texas and Arizona have learned the hard way, protecting children from harm is a hard job that requires a certain level of manpower and funding to be done properly. If North Carolina wants to improve its child protective agency (and I see no indication that it does), it’ll do what Texas and Arizona did – hire more people, pay them more and give them reasonable caseloads.

It’ll come to exactly that in North Carolina at some point in the not-too-distant future. But for now, the legislature has to have its little tantrum, show everyone who’s boss and rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. Having done so, perhaps it’ll soon get down to actually addressing the problem of how to adequately protect the state’s kids. Perhaps.

July 26, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Our old friend Attorney Richard Ducote is back in the news for a couple of reasons.  The first is that he’s once again lost a casein which his client was a woman who accused her male former partner of physical abuse (Deadspin, 1/25/18).  Sandra Brooks made elaborate claims about abuse by NFL referee Carl Johnson, but the judge in the case ruled she’d failed to prove her claims and dismissed her action.  The local police have now charged her.

A few months later, the focus of the criminal investigation changed as well. Investigators had decided that no charges would be filed against Johnson, and, according to the sheriff’s office, Brooks was under investigation instead as “the predominant aggressor.”…

A month later, on Nov. 7, Brooks turned herself in after a warrant was issued for her arrest. She is now charged with domestic battery, defamation, filing a false police report, and filing a false petition for a protective order.

Having failed in his effort to prove Johnson the abuser when in fact it was his client Brooks who appears to have merited that title, Ducote withdrew from the case.

The second reason he’s in the news is that he’s filed documents to become a justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court (The Advocate, 7/19/18).

Prominent lawyer Richard Ducote, of Covington, filled out the papers and paid the fees to challenge Associate Supreme Court Justice Greg Guidry.

Ducote is a high-profile figure in the legal community, but, from what I can gather, he seems to have a couple of Achilles heels.  One is that he seems to invariably represent women.  Are there no men worthy of his time and talents?  The second is that often the evidence supporting his client fails to pass the smell test.  The latter seldom seems to deter Ducote’s enthusiasm for a case.

Consider these few items (Times-Picayune, 6/13/15).

In a 2007 case decided by the Fifth District Court of Appeals in Texas, Ducote accepted a $50,000 retainer but was then barred from representing a woman with a child after “testimony about the number of times Ducote had been sanctioned in state and federal courts across the country, and his filing bankruptcy to avoid payment of sanctions.”

An appeals court in Florida issued sanctions against Ducote in 2007 stemming from his representation of wife in a bitter divorce case there. The appeals court accused Ducote of making “frivolous objections” that led to additional expenses, using illegal obtained evidence, asking embarrassing questions to intimate a witness and placing the husband “in a position where he was forced to seek emergency relief related to pre-trial publicity.”

Ducote was also linked to another case in the Texas appeals court in which a mother abducted child was abducted by the mother.

An amicus attorney involved in that Texas case shared the father’s concerns the mother might try to bolt with the child. That attorney “informed the court she had conducted research on Ducote and spoken to attorneys opposing him in cases across the country,” the opinion says. “The attorney reported that Ducote has multiple web sites designed to attract women who believe they have been battered or their children sexually abused.”

Ducote, the court feared, would become complicit in an attempt to have the child, taken abroad, according to the opinion.

“Significant documentation about Ducote and his judgments, sanctions and disciplinary actions was attached to the motion,” the document says. “The attachments … also included the affidavit of an investigator (who) stated that anytime Ducote is involved in a case the parent and child are considered a high risk for flight from the court, not just because of Ducote but because of the groups with which Ducote is involved.”

Unsurprisingly, Ducote denies wrongdoing in the abduction case and I have no reason not to believe him.  Face it, attorneys have no way of knowing everything their clients are doing, have done or intend to do regarding a case in litigation.  Still, the sheer volume of findings against him by various courts in various states says a lot.  I’ve known countless attorneys, some of them bulldog litigators like Ducote, but none has his record of sanctions against him/her.

Ducote’s primary failing seems to be his willingness to believe women who claim they’ve been abused.  Consider the North Dakota cases of Norberg v. Norberg.  The first was a divorce and custody case, the second a case of defamation, false arrest, malicious prosecution and the like.  Once again Ducote represented the woman, Alonna Norberg (later Knorr) and once again she alleged abuse (this time sexual) by her husband Jon Norberg. 

The court found Alonna to not be a credible witness and that her claims of abuse were “false” and made with the intention of gaining the upper hand in the child custody case.  It also found that litigation of the false claims had ruined Jon financially.  That’s easy to believe.  A glance at the opinion of the North Dakota Supreme Court, affirming the trial court’s findings, reveals points on appeal raised by Ducote that transparently have no validity.  For example, Alonna claimed that the trial court gave custody to Jon because the criminal court had acquitted him of her charges of sexual battery.  But, as the Supreme Court noted, that simply wasn’t true as the trial record plainly showed.

However, the court did not rely on Jon Norberg’s acquittal in the criminal proceedings to determine Alonna Norberg’s allegations were false. The court’s findings clearly indicate it considered the evidence presented at the divorce trial and determined her allegations were not credible. The court explained why it did not find her allegations credible. The court did not misapply the law and improperly rely on Jon Norberg’s acquittal in the criminal proceedings.

Raising such a patently untrue issue on appeal wastes both the court’s time and the client’s money.  No wonder Jon Norberg’s finances were in tatters once Alonna and her lawyer got through with them.  How much of that was Ducote’s doing, is anyone’s guess, but we should remember that this is a man with a record that includes a court complaining of his “frivolous objections that led to additional expenses.”

Ducote’s client in Norberg was a physician and a drug addict.  The court noted that she was taking some 40 different medications, at least some of them opiates.  It also noted that her physical and emotional instability adversely affected their children.  Could Richard Ducote really not see the obvious when she came to him with a claim of sexual abuse?  Did it truly not occur to him that she read the writing on the wall, that Jon stood a good chance of getting custody and that her claims were fabricated for the sole purpose of thwarting that very outcome?

There are two possibilities – he either saw what was apparent to all or he didn’t.  If he didn’t, he’s an inexcusably poor judge of people, but I suspect that’s not the case.  I suspect he understood the situation all too well, but realized that he had a physician for a client and a fairly well-to-do opponent.  That of course spelled one thing – m-o-n-e-y.  And Ducote took that ball and ran with it.

Did his drug-addicted client realize what was happening?  Who knows?  But something one lawyer quoted by the Times-Picayune had to say seems on point.

“He presents himself as this savior, as probably the most recognized expert in child sexual abuse cases. There are a lot of vulnerable, vulnerable people out there and they want to believe in what Ducote has to say. Some do so for good reasons, some not.”

Several months ago Richard Ducote contacted me regarding a case I’d written about.  He claimed that, contrary to the court’s initial findings, his client, the mother, had been vindicated at last, that she’d regained custody and the dad had been found to be abusive after all.  I told him I was glad he’d contacted me and that I’d be willing to post an update on the case.  Of course I needed to see the new ruling by the court that supported Ducote’s claims.  Would he send it to me?  He said he would.  That was some seven months ago and, to date I’ve heard nary a word from him.  I emailed him once to remind him that he’d said he’d send me the judge’s ruling, but that too has borne no fruit.

I would encourage Ducote to be a lot more rigorous about who he chooses as his clients, to abandon what looks like his “believe the woman” bias, to objectively assess the evidence in a case before taking it to court.  But I have a feeling Ducote wouldn’t pay my blandishments any heed.  He strikes me as simply not that kind of lawyer.

July 25, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

This is a fine article (Wall Street Journal, 7/20/18).  It’s not only good in its own right, but good in ways I suspect its author never imagined.  The writer, Abigail Shrier is intent on calling out the #MeToo movement and, more generally, a type of gender feminism that seeks to infantilize women by absolving them of responsibility for their own behavior.  Plus, she sticks up for masculinity.

About all that, Shrier does a pretty good job.  She tells about her father and her upbringing with him and her mother and, in the process, says a lot about masculinity and how valuable it is to society.  Good for her.

But, perhaps inadvertently, she does more.  In the process of recalling her childhood with her dad, Shrier also reveals much about the ways fathers tend to parent, how they’re different from the way mothers tend to do that job and the importance of each to the children they raise and the adults those children eventually become.

Mothers’ tend to give unconditional love, the type that inculcates that all-important sense of self-esteem in children.  If it works as intended, children emerge with a strong sense of their own worth that no amount of assault by a cold, uncaring world can dislodge.

By contrast, fathers, though fully loving their children, make demands that mothers often don’t.  Here’s Shrier’s description of her dad.

My father never let me get away with self-pity. Never allowed me to win an argument with tears. He regarded unbridled emotion in place of reason as vaguely pathetic; if I had any chance of prevailing in a discussion, the first thing I needed to do was calm down.

And when young men didn’t like me or were poised to treat me badly, it was my father’s regard that I found myself consulting and relying upon. When a man tries to mistreat a woman—I’m not talking about violence, but the instinct to convey to her that she isn’t worth very much—he is unlikely to get very far with a woman whose father has made her feel that she’s worth a whole lot.

In short, he demanded a lot of his daughter.  He knew that the world she would someday enter wouldn’t stop for her tears or her demands for special treatment.  He knew that the best gift he could give her was the ability to be her own toughest critic, to expect more of herself than any teacher or employer.  And guess what.  It worked.  And guess what else.  Abigail Shrier is forever grateful to him for his parenting of her.  She knows to a certainty that many right decisions she’s already made have been possible because of the standards he set for her.

Of course, since it’s not that sort of article, what Shrier doesn’t say is that every kid needs what her father gave to her.  Mother’s love, however strong and unstinting it may be, isn’t all kids need.  They need their fathers because dads and mothers parent differently and children need both kinds.  For hundreds of thousands of years, humans have been a bi-parental species and our children can’t now begin going without one or the other.

And yet the gist of family court orders is that they must.  Handing the kids to Mom wasn’t as important 60 years ago when there were comparatively few divorces, but now when almost one of two marriages ends that way, society depends to an astonishing degree on the good sense of family court judges.  Sadly, that good sense is in painfully short supply.  In the face of reams of data and simple common sense demonstrating that children need both parents, family courts still blithely kick dads to the curb.

A society in which over 41% of children are born to single mothers, almost half of all marriages end in divorce and non-marital relationships break down even more readily than marital ones desperately needs some way in which to ensure that kids don’t lose their relationships with their parents.  To do otherwise risks children growing to adulthood with all the sense of entitlement engendered by mothers’ love but with none of the sense of responsibility that comes from fathers’.

And sure enough, that’s exactly the target at which Shrier aims.

There is something regrettable in the way our exclusive focus on boys and men lets young women off the hook. As if women bear no responsibility for their own behavior. As if they are too weak, too emotional, too foolish ever to take care of themselves.

And that is the greatest disappointment of the #MeToo movement, that it has so spectacularly refused to insist that a woman not allow any man to treat her badly. Failed to insist that young women have an individual responsibility to demand better. That they should all agree no job is worth more than their dignity.

That’s the description of a generation that’s been brought up without fathers – fathers who could have instilled in their sons and daughters what Shrier’s instilled in her – the certain knowledge that they and they alone bear responsibility for their own lives.

July 23, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Jason Griffith points out an aspect of shared parenting that’s almost invariably overlooked, at least by me (Cincinnati.com, 7/19/18). Mea culpa; I should have been more thoughtful in my commentary. Griffith is the minority outreach director of Kentucky for the National Parents Organization. As readers will recall, back in April, the Kentucky Legislature overwhelmingly passed the first law in the English-speaking world that presumes equal parenting post-divorce. The governor signed the bill into law and it went into effect on July 14. The new law was an NPO initiative.

Readers well know the multiple benefits to children of shared parenting, but Griffith points out that those are especially pertinent to African-American children and their dads.

In particular, African-American fathers in Kentucky will have a new starting point in determining custody. A 2014 study in the Berkeley Journal of African-American Law & Policy concluded that extreme challenges exist in obtaining parental rights due to stereotypes surrounding African-American masculinity. According to the findings, “Though unmarried, noncustodial black fathers are more likely to visit and spend time with their children than unmarried, noncustodial fathers of other races, black men must contend with the stereotype that they are Absent Black Fathers when they enter the courtroom.”

I can only imagine. If there’s a bias against fathers in family courts, and multiple studies say there is, then black dads likely receive a double whammy. After all, it’s not as if we see much in pop culture or the everyday news about loving, fit, present black fathers. What we see are a lot of are young men largely indifferent to their kids, if they even know about them at all.

Of course the study Griffith cites plus many, many others, belie the image of black fathers purveyed by television, movies and the news. But what’s science compared to exciting portrayals of paternal negligence or even brutality? And the work of Dr. Katherine Edin based on her data and countless other researchers based on the information out of the ongoing Fragile Families and Child Well-being surveys have added hugely to the depth and nuance of our understanding of poor, mostly unmarried parents, many of whom are black. Put simply, the facts strongly rebut pop culture when it comes to black fathers.

And the issues faced by black fathers don’t stop there.

Without this law, unfortunate trends for single African-American fathers could continue. For instance, the Berkeley Journal study concluded, “As a result of the economic obligations noncustodial fathers face, the definition of a good father post-divorce or post-separation has become synonymous with the ability to pay child support.”

Indeed. Eighteen months ago I did a series of posts about “responsible fatherhood” programs, some of which were being studied at the time. Viewing those programs dispassionately, it’s hard to distinguish the term “responsible fatherhood” from “get a job and pay what you owe.” To say that the focus of those programs was money paid from Dad to Mom is to understate the matter considerably.

Now, I have no quarrel with programs to help unemployed men to get and keep jobs. That’s all to the good for them, their families, their communities and the public weal. But the message of “responsible fatherhood” programs couldn’t be clearer: Dad, you’re a walking wallet and little else. How many of the half dozen programs, for example, offered fathers legal aid with which to understand (and possibly fight) the child support case or, more importantly, assert their parental rights? Not a one.

Parental rights of course are supposed to come with the obligation to pay, but as ever, the state that brings down its full weight against fathers in child support cases, lifts nary a finger to help them assert their parental rights. This is hardly news, but when we name initiatives “responsible fatherhood” programs, might we not expect them to handle both sides of the issue? Fatherhood isn’t writing a check every month, but time and again in our legal system, it certainly looks as if it were. Recall for example that the Office of Child Support Enforcement budgets some $5 billion to enforce child support orders, but a scant $10 million to help fathers enforce visitation orders.

That 500:1 ratio tells us all we need to know about the status of fathers in family courts and the federal government.

So Griffith has hit the nail squarely on the head. Kentucky’s new law will benefit all kids, but will perhaps do most for African-American ones. Their fathers have the hardest time fighting the anti-father bias of family courts and so stand to gain the most from a law that requires 50-50 parenting time as a starting point.

Many experts, including the National Parents Organization, have already hailed this as the best shared parenting law in the country. Dr. Ryan Schroeder, chair of the University of Louisville’s Sociology Department, testified in support of this effort, saying, “The research on shared parenting is remarkably clear. Children who go through a divorce fare much better when they have equal, or as close to equal as they can get, parenting time.”

That goes for all kids of course, but black fathers and their children may benefit more than others.

July 22, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

I’m privileged to know Molly Olson. She’s a veteran of the legislative wars on behalf of shared parenting in Minnesota. Put simply, no one has fought longer or harder to do what’s right for kids there than Molly Olson.

So everyone should pay close attention when she speaks as she does in this op-ed (Twin Cities.com, 7/19/18). Olson measures her words; there’s no hyperbole in her piece. But beneath the calm surface of her article simmers frustration bordering on anger. She’s not screaming, but we get the feeling she’d like to.

That’s because the political powers that be allow the narrowest of special interest to thwart changes in laws and policies that would benefit the children of the state. And they’ve done it year after year after year for an astonishing 19 years.

For almost two decades, Minnesota legislators have chief-authored, co-authored, and voted in favor of bi-partisan bills supporting a baseline of joint physical custody and equal shared parenting for fit, healthy, loving, responsible parents, but their efforts on behalf of the public are continuously blocked at various stages of the legislative process.

Many versions of shared parenting bills, with clear exceptions that consider logistics and safety of children, have been discussed in every Minnesota legislative session for the last 19 years.

Sometimes those bills even manage to pass both houses of the legislature, but in Minnesota, that gets them no closer to becoming law than if they’d languished in committee.

Key senators from both parties refused to hear the bill in committee. Why? Because, multiple sources confirmed, Gov. Mark Dayton would likely again veto any shared parenting bill unless all other “stakeholders” — aka divorce-lawyer lobby groups — agree. Dayton vetoed a 35 percent parenting time bill in 2012. His veto letter stated, “I am particularly influenced by the strong opposition of so many organizations … who work every day with the most challenging divorces …”. It was divorce lawyer organizations who co-signed a strong opposition letter.

The failure to make equal parenting the presumption in child custody cases isn’t for want of staunch support on the part of some lawmakers.

Civil Law Committee Chair and chief author Rep. Peggy Scott said, “It is as clear as ever that Minnesota’s laws regarding parenting time need to be reformed. There needs to be a more level playing field when both parents walk into a courtroom so kids end up having the critical benefit of substantial time and involvement of both their parents.”

But with a governor whose support for children’s well-being doesn’t exceed his desire to appease divorce lawyers, who, presumably, reciprocate with campaign cash, nothing can get done. And as usual, the lawyers oppose equal parenting because they know its tendency to reduce conflict and therefore their fees.

Family-law attorney Brian Chmielewski opines, when it comes to younger children, “the district courts still tend to favor mothers, despite the fact that the ‘tender years doctrine’ is supposed to be abolished. Minnesota law does not encourage equal shared parenting. The Minnesota system is adversarial … some lawyers complicate and diminish the opportunities for parents to solve their case, creating legal issues and rifts that oftentimes result in discouraging early settlement.”

There is no excuse for this dereliction of duty on the part of legislators and the governor who refuse to do the obvious – bring Minnesota law into agreement with the science on children’s welfare and parenting time post-divorce. Those people know the benefits conferred on children by maintaining real relationships with both parents after the adults split up and yet they ignore those very benefits. That is disgraceful.

It’s the more so because, if the voters of Minnesota are like those of Missouri and Maryland and everywhere else such a poll has been conducted, they overwhelmingly support shared parenting as the starting point in divorces involving children.

That brings me to the topic I’ve broached before – electoral politics. Now, the National Parents Organization is a 501(c)(3) organization and therefore can’t advocate on behalf of or against individual office seekers. But the next step for the ever-growing legions of shared parenting supporters is to begin raising money via PACs and targeting for defeat those officeholders who fail in their duty to promote equal parenting and supporting those who do. There’s already one at work in Florida and I expect to see more as time goes on. When voting in favor of shared parenting bills becomes not only the right thing, but the prudent thing to do as well, we’ll see old, outdated child custody laws and practices falling like wheat before the scythe.

Meanwhile, let’s all give a round of applause for Molly Olson who continues to fight the good fight against forces that long ago should have left the field.

July 20, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

A new survey, conducted for the National Parents Organization in Missouri shows once again overwhelming support for equal parenting. The poll was conducted by the professional polling organization, Public Policy Polling. It asked a representative sample of 468 Missourians about a number of issues related to shared parenting. The results were unequivocal, a landslide in favor of shared parenting.

Here are some examples of the questions and the responses:

Do you feel that children have the right to spend equal time or near equal time with both parents, if they are deemed fit and willing, following a divorce or separation, or not?

88% of respondents said children should have that right, 2% said they weren’t and 10% weren’t sure.

Do you agree or disagree with the following statement: Both parents, whether living together or living apart, should have equal access to their children and should share the responsibility for raising their children?

80% agreed with that statement, 7% disagreed and 13% weren’t sure.

Do you agree or disagree with the following statement: A child would benefit from having equal time with both fit and willing parents following divorce?

With that statement, 85% agreed, 5% disagreed and 10% weren’t sure.

In general, who do you think should have more parental rights — the mother, the father, or do you think their rights should be equal?

To that, 74% said rights should be equal, 13% said mothers should have superior rights, 4% said fathers should and 9% weren’t sure.

Do you feel that fit and willing mothers and fathers should share in the responsibility of raising and providing for children whether they are married or divorced, or not?

90% of respondents said mothers and fathers should share the responsibility, 2% said they shouldn’t and 8% weren’t sure.

Do you agree or disagree with the following statement: A child’s health and well-being is better met when both fit and willing parents are equally involved in the child’s life, and share responsibility for the child, rather than one parent?

88% agreed, 2% disagreed and 10% weren’t sure.

And then the kicker:

Would you support or oppose a change in Missouri Family Law that would award children equal time with both fit and willing parents in instances of divorce?

To that question, 76% of respondents said they would support such a change, 8% said they’d oppose it and 17% weren’t sure.

Two years ago, a similar survey was done in Maryland with similar landslide results. In Missouri, as in Maryland, the overwhelming support for shared parenting crosses all lines of race, sex, party affiliation and age.

In Missouri as in Maryland, legislators have a choice. They can vote the wishes of the people who vote them into office – and can vote them out – or they can thwart those wishes. They can support the best interests of children or they can continue a status quo that is bad for kids, bad for fathers, bad for mothers, bad for society generally and bad for the public purse.

You’d think that would be an easy choice.

July 19, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

The National Parents Organization has had another success, this time in Massachusetts (Beacon Hill Patch, 7/13/18). NPO helped draft and pass House Bill 3090 that encourages judges to order shared parenting in divorce cases. The Bay State’s House of Representatives passed the bill that has now gone to the Senate Rules Committee for consideration.

If the Rules Committee and the Senate as a whole want to follow their constituents’ wishes, they’ll promptly approve HB 3090. In a non-binding referendum, a whopping 86% of Massachusetts voters said they approved of shared parenting following divorce. As in other states, that support crossed all the usual lines of race, class, sex and party affiliation. As a strictly political matter, it doesn’t get much clearer than that; the voters of Massachusetts want shared parenting. Will their elected officials take heed?

We’ll soon find out. The Senate discontinues its session during the first week of August. That means it’s vital that as many supporters of shared parenting as possible contact their senators and tell them politely to vote for HB 3090. They need to do so early and often until the bill is voted out of committee and passed by the full Senate.

As before, the usual suspects stand in the way of passage. They are Senators Cynthia Creem and Will Brownsberger, both of whom just happen to be divorce lawyers when they’re not attending to their senatorial duties. I’ve written often that the only true opponents of shared parenting left are family lawyers and Creem and Brownsberger are two prime examples. When they oppose shared parenting bills, they’re putting their fees ahead of the well-being of Massachusetts kids and their parents. After all,

The Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health published a 150,000-person study that concluded shared parenting after divorce or separation is in the best interest of children’s health.

The Journal of the American Psychological Association published a paper endorsed by 110 eminent authorities around the world that concluded, “… shared parenting should be the norm for parenting plans for children of all ages, including very young children.”

The Association of Family and Conciliation Courts (AFCC) published the recommendations of 32 family law experts, who concluded that “Children’s best interests are furthered by parenting plans that provide for continuing and shared parenting relationships that are safe, secure, and developmentally responsive…”

And,

According to federal statistics from sources including the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Census Bureau, children raised by single parents account for:

63 percent of teen suicides

70 percent of juveniles in state-operated institutions

71 percent of high school drop-outs

75 percent of children in chemical abuse centers

85 percent of those in prison

85 percent of children who exhibit behavioral disorders

90 percent of homeless and runaway children

Plus, as Prof. Linda Nielsen found in her summary of over 60 studies of shared vs. sole parenting,

One of the greatest advantages of joint physical custody are improved family relationships and better physical and mental health. Specifically, Nielsen’s research found that children in shared parenting arrangements had closer, communicative relationships with both parents and grandparents As a result, Nielsen continued that “children who have close relationships with their grandparents after their parents separate are better adjusted emotionally and behaviorally than those who do not”

Additionally, a number of the studies found that children with shared parenting arrangements were “physically healthier and had fewer psychosomatic, stress-related problems (insomnia, intestinal problems, headaches, etc.)

In a large number of studies, children with shared parenting also had fewer issues relating to depression, life satisfaction, anxiety and self-esteem

Research also shows that children in shared parenting environments are better adjusted and have fewer behavioral issues dealing with drinking, smoking, using drugs, being aggressive, bullying, committing delinquent acts, etc.

Shared parenting: children need it, voters want it and it confers a wide range of benefits on parents and society generally. What’s not to like?

So get on the phone and call your Massachusetts state senator. Send him/her an email. Visit the capitol and meet your senator in person. Do whatever you can, but make your voice heard. Don’t allow the family lawyers to any longer dictate the relationships kids can have with their parents.

July 18, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Way back in the 80s, I used to watch what was then “The McNeil-Lehrer News Hour.” It usually dealt with three issues, allocating about 20 minutes to each. The show always had guests with competing viewpoints on whatever the topic was. It was so invariable in that way that it moved some wag to write a humorous takeoff on it, something like “Jesus Christ – Son of God or Jewish Troublemaker? Tonight we have two views…”

This article reminded me of that old send-up of McNeil-Lehrer (Japan News, 7/15/18). It’s about the fact that the Japanese government seems to be considering revamping its child custody laws that desperately need it. Japan is explicitly a sole-custody country. Here’s how the article describes its approach to child custody post-divorce:

Article 819 of the Civil Code stipulates that custody after divorce shall be possessed by one parent. This removes from the family register the official relationship between a parent without custody and their child or children.

A parent who has custody holds the right and duty to educate their children and administer their children’s property, but a parent without custody is rarely involved in raising his or her offspring, and is also tightly restricted from seeing them.

Needless to say, custodial parents are almost exclusively mothers. Not content to marginalize the non-custodial parent, Japanese law appears to actually sever the legal relationship between that parent and his children.

So the government is thinking about changing the law to promote joint custody. What would that mean in practice?

Under an envisaged system, custody rights will remain for both father and mother after a divorce. Thus, both parents will continue to be jointly responsible for raising their children. By encouraging interaction with children and divorced parents through more frequent visitation, the government aims to create an environment to facilitate the balanced upbringing of children.

Ah, comes the dawn! Those words “more frequent visitation” are the real indicator of what the Japanese government is up to, i.e. not much. After all, given that now the non-custodial parent is “tightly restricted from seeing [the kids],” “more frequent visitation” might mean anything. One day per month would likely be a big change.

We’ll see what happens, but at least Japan is making noises about moving in the direction of real joint custody. Stated another way, they’re starting to think about no longer abusing the children of divorce.

What amuses me about the article, what made me think of that long-ago jab at McNeil-Lehrer is the handy-dandy chart at the head of the article. It’s carefully divided into the pros and cons of sole and joint custody and, in the scrupulously balanced way of the McNeil-Lehrer News Hour, there are two pros for sole custody, two pros for joint custody and of course two cons for each.

Sometimes journalists get the whole idea of “balance” wrong. They think – and their editors agree – that, regardless of the issue, there must be two (and often only two) sides, each of which requires an airing. The simple fact is that often, that’s just not true. I mean, what’s next, “There were some GOOD things about World War II?”

So what, according to the article, are the positives about sole parenting? One is “Helps child build stable relationship with parent.” Really? The fact is that, unless the child is a newborn, it already has a stable relationship with its parents. Sole custody destroys one of those relationships.

What about the negatives of joint custody? One of course is one of the usual talking points of the anti-shared parenting crowd.

May cause child to have “two homes” by going back and forth between parents’ houses.

That of course has been debunked numerous times by the applicable science, but the anti-shared parenting minions don’t have anything better to offer, so they keep repeating the “kids living out of a suitcase” red herring.

What’s most remarkable about the article’s chart is that it nowhere includes the concept that kids do better and are happier, healthier and better adjusted when raised in joint custody than in any other post-divorce arrangement. To say the least, that’s a notable omission. Indeed, I’d think it would be by far the most important item on the chart. But of course if that fact were listed, it would obviate the chart altogether. After all, what’s best for kids should outweigh everything else, right?

But that would run afoul of the journalist’s need for “balance” however deceptive and illusory it may be.

National Parents Organization commends the Massachusetts House of Representatives for passing an important child custody bill that not only encourages shared parenting in instances of divorce but also stands to improve the health and well-being of thousands of children throughout the state. Read the article here.